The latest episode of TrueNAS Tech Talk (T3) — Episode 56 — dropped on March 6, 2026, and it’s packed with news that every TrueNAS homelab enthusiast and sysadmin will want to hear. Hosts Kris Moore and Chris Peredun (the TrueNAS HoneyBadger) cover the upcoming TrueNAS 26 release schedule, a deep dive into the new dataset tiering feature, and tackle eight viewer questions.
TrueNAS 26: A (Tentative!) Release Timeline
The big headline this week is that Kris and Chris finally lay out the tentative roadmap from the first TrueNAS 26 BETA release all the way through to the .0 general availability. If you’ve been waiting to know when you can get your hands on the next generation of TrueNAS software, this episode gives you the clearest picture yet. No more codenames, no more decimal versioning — as the team confirmed back in Ep. 52, TrueNAS is moving to a clean annual release cycle, and 26 is the first major fruit of that shift.
Dataset Tiering: Hybrid Storage Gets Smarter
One of the standout features coming to TrueNAS 26 is dataset tiering — the ability to mix fast flash and spinning-disk pools and automatically tier datasets (or shares) between them. This is an Enterprise-tier feature, meaning it won’t land in the Community Edition, but the architecture is fascinating for anyone interested in how ZFS and TrueNAS manage data placement at scale. Since this is implemented at the TrueNAS layer rather than directly in OpenZFS, pools remain compatible with standard OpenZFS if you ever need to migrate away, though some caveats may apply.
For those of us running pure Community Edition homelabs — Docker stacks, S3-compatible storage, and all — it’s still a great signal of the direction TrueNAS engineering is heading.
Eight Viewer Questions
As always, Kris and Chris close out the episode with a batch of community questions — likely touching on storage configuration, upgrade paths, and follow-up on ZFS AnyRaid and Spotlight search (truesearch) from recent episodes.
Why This Episode Matters for Homelab Users
If you’re self-hosting on TrueNAS Scale — running Docker containers, managing snapshots over Tailscale, or experimenting with S3-compatible backends like RustFS or Garage — TrueNAS 26 is a significant milestone. The annual cadence promises more predictable upgrade windows, and features like dataset tiering give a window into where the platform’s storage smarts are heading.
Watch the full episode on the TrueNAS blog or on YouTube.
T3 Tech Talk is a weekly podcast from the TrueNAS team. New episodes drop every Thursday.
So …
- Beta 1 at the end of March
- Beta 2 at the end of May
- RC in July
- Official release in September
/root 